Every ambitious product is built on rules. Some are legal, some are technical, others are cultural — but all carry an aura of permanence. When strategy treats these rules as absolutes, design begins to fail in precisely the places where legitimacy matters most: on the margins. What looks like an edge case on paper often represents a whole community in practice.
For UX strategy, the question is not whether edge cases exist — it’s whether they are dismissed or absorbed. Ignoring them might look efficient in the short term, but over time it corrodes trust, blocks access, and undermines legitimacy. Strategic clarity comes from recognising that edge cases aren’t just anomalies to be handled later. They are signals of where the system’s design is most fragile.
Scenario: Locked Out of Legitimacy
Situation
A young woman in London, the daughter of immigrants, applies for her first job.
She was born in the UK, but her visible ethnicity triggers an extra check: she’s asked to verify her right to work through the government’s new digital ID app.
She has never travelled abroad (so no passport) and never needed to drive (so no licence).
Impact
- She tries to download the app, only to find her older iPhone can’t run the required version of iOS.
- Guidance points her back to passport or licence verification — options she doesn’t have.
- The helpline offers an in-person appointment, but the earliest slot is weeks away.
- Meanwhile, her job application stalls.
- Instead of opening doors, the system quietly bars her entry.
Tension
- What was sold as a universal scheme instead functions as a selective barrier.
- Official compliance metrics will count her as a failure to engage, but the reality is exclusion baked into design.
- The unhappy path is not an anomaly — it reflects whose legitimacy is questioned first, and whose access is conditional.
Approach
She tries to work the system as instructed: reinstalling the app, borrowing a friend’s phone, even considering applying for a passport she doesn’t need just to satisfy the process.
Each attempt adds friction, delays, and cost.
Her determination to comply only highlights how rigid the system is — and how little space it leaves for legitimate users outside its assumptions.
Resolution
Clarity requires treating rules as living artefacts.
Rather than enforcing one rigid path, strategy must ask: do these rules build credibility and trust, or simply enforce conformity?
And do the tools align with real contexts, or enshrine assumptions that leave some citizens locked out of their own country’s promises?
From Edge Case to Strategy Case
In product meetings, edge cases are often spoken about as irritations: the tiny percentage of users whose needs “aren’t worth solving for” right now. But in reality, these edge cases are where systems reveal their deepest fragility. What gets dismissed as marginal can, at scale, represent entire demographics who share overlapping circumstances. To ignore them is not just a tactical oversight — it’s a strategic blind spot.
Institutional Isomorphism shows how organisations mimic one another’s rules and frameworks in order to project legitimacy. In UX strategy, this tendency often leads to rule adoption without context. Rules that “work elsewhere” are copied to satisfy optics, not to serve real users. The result: systems that appear credible on paper but alienate people in practice.
This is compounded by the dynamics of compliance. Normative vs. Coercive Compliance highlights the difference between following rules because they are trusted and following them because they are enforced. When users comply only under coercion, systems risk eroding legitimacy rather than reinforcing it. Edge cases are the frontline in this tension: the people whose experience makes clear whether compliance feels fair and credible, or arbitrary and alienating.
By treating edge cases as strategy cases, leaders create the space to test legitimacy where it is most fragile. Instead of relegating these users to “backlog someday fixes“, their stories become diagnostic probes into the resilience of the system. Far from being marginal, they are the crucibles in which trust, accessibility, and credibility are forged.
Optics vs Outcomes
Every ambitious product launches with a promise: compliance achieved, adoption secured, impact delivered. Dashboards light up with charts that show steady upward progress, and stakeholders point to these as proof of success. Yet optics are not outcomes. Numbers that look reassuring in a quarterly review may mask exclusion in the lived reality of users.
This dynamic is captured in Merton’s Self-Fulfilling Prophecy. When institutions assume their rules are being followed, they act as though legitimacy has been achieved. That belief then sustains itself: the existence of compliance metrics becomes proof enough, even when the ground truth diverges. In the context of UX, a product team can celebrate “verified user counts” while ignoring the growing queue of people locked out by rigid processes. The numbers tell a story of progress, but the lived outcome is exclusion.
Layered on top is the trap described by Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Compliance rates, onboarding completions, or “time-to-verify” statistics all sound like reliable indicators of success. But once they are turned into strategic goals, systems are designed to maximise them — even if that means gaming the measure at the expense of real usability. The metric thrives, but the mission falters.
This tension between optics and outcomes is not just academic. For our protagonist, the outcome is stalled opportunity, blocked by rules that measure compliance rather than service. For the system’s architects, the optics may look excellent: an increase in registrations, high completion rates, reports of “modernisation achieved.” Without embedding checks that tie metrics back to lived usability, the system risks celebrating exclusion as progress.
Strategic clarity means designing measures that resist this drift. Outcomes must be grounded in whether users succeed in their real goals — securing a job, accessing a service, exercising a right — not whether the system successfully validates its own rules. Without that distinction, legitimacy is hollow, and strategy collapses into theatre.
Artefacts, Not Absolutes
Rules, policies, and standards often carry an aura of permanence. Once codified into systems, they begin to feel timeless — as though they represent universal truths rather than context-bound choices. But rules are not eternal. They are artefacts of the moment in which they were created, shaped by the technologies, cultures, and priorities of that time. Treating them as absolutes is one of the fastest ways to build fragility into a product.
Sociotechnical Systems (STS) Theory reminds us that technology and culture co-evolve. A verification process that once made sense in a paper-first bureaucracy may be deeply misaligned when translated into a smartphone app. What worked when users all carried passports or had access to the latest devices no longer works when demographics shift, costs rise, or usage patterns diversify. Without active interrogation, rules designed for yesterday’s contexts quietly embed dysfunction into today’s systems.
Automation adds another layer of brittleness. The Paradox of Automation shows that the more we rely on systems to enforce rules, the more catastrophic failure becomes when those rules are wrong. Encoding rules into software hardens them: what might once have been a flexible guideline becomes a non-negotiable barrier. For the user, this means there is no human to appeal to when the system says “no.” For the strategist, it means a single outdated assumption can scale into systemic exclusion.
This rigidity is amplified by cognitive shortcuts. When a rule has existed long enough, it feels natural — obvious, even. Teams stop asking why it exists and begin assuming it must be true. That is how artefacts fossilise into absolutes. Strategic UX requires breaking that cycle: questioning where a rule came from, what context it was designed for, and whether it still serves its intended purpose.
To design as though rules are living artefacts is to keep them open to interrogation, reframing, and renewal. It doesn’t mean abandoning standards, but recognising that standards themselves must evolve. The cost of treating artefacts as absolutes is not just technical debt — it is social debt, eroding trust and legitimacy among those excluded by outdated assumptions.
Feedback as a Strategic Loop
No product can anticipate every possible user journey. At national or international scale, the combinations of demographics, contexts, and constraints multiply into thousands of legitimate edge cases. That complexity is not a flaw — it is the reality of modern service design. The danger comes when strategy assumes it can predict everything up front and locks the rulebook accordingly.
Resilience Engineering offers a useful lens here. Resilient systems aren’t those that never fail, but those that fail gracefully, adapt quickly, and recover credibility in the eyes of users. In UX terms, this means creating visible and responsive pathways for feedback: if a user is locked out, the system must learn and evolve, not double down on exclusion. Strategy that assumes perfection at launch guarantees brittleness. Strategy that embeds adaptation anticipates imperfection and plans for it.
Complexity theory reinforces this point. The Cynefin Framework distinguishes between simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic contexts. National-scale digital services rarely sit in the “simple” or “complicated” categories. They live in the “complex” — environments where solutions emerge through iteration, experimentation, and continuous sensemaking. When organisations misclassify these systems as simple rule-enforcement problems, they inevitably design for rigidity instead of learning.
The unhappy path of our protagonist illustrates this danger: she followed the rules, attempted the prescribed fixes, even sought alternative devices — but the system had no adaptive capacity to learn from her experience. Each failure fed back into exclusion, not redesign. For the user, this feels like abandonment. For the institution, it is a missed opportunity to strengthen legitimacy through responsiveness.
Embedding feedback as a strategic loop means building products with the humility to admit they cannot anticipate every outcome. Iteration becomes not a sign of failure but a sign of resilience. Listening to real users, especially those at the margins, is what allows systems to remain legitimate, trustworthy, and adaptive in the long run.
Conclusion
Rules give systems their shape, but they can also hollow them out. When strategy treats edge cases as marginal, optics as outcomes, artefacts as absolutes, or feedback as optional, exclusion becomes inevitable. The result is a product that looks legitimate on paper but fails in practice — and users are the ones left locked out.
But legitimacy isn’t secured through dashboards or announcements. It’s earned in the lived experience of people pressing against the system’s edges. That is why UX strategy, at its most strategic, demands humility: rules must be interrogated, measures must be tested against outcomes, and feedback must loop back into design.
The lesson for leaders and strategists is simple but uncomfortable: edge cases are not distractions. They are the places where your system’s true character is revealed. Treat them as signals, not noise, and you turn exclusion into clarity, fragility into resilience, and compliance into credibility.
If strategy means anything, it is this: rules should serve people, not the other way around.
Strategic Markers
From Edge Case to Strategy Case
-
Edge cases reveal fragility
What looks marginal often signals systemic failure. -
Compliance ≠ legitimacy
Metrics may flatter dashboards but can mask exclusion. -
Rules are artefacts
Treat standards as living, not eternal truths. -
Automation amplifies rigidity
When wrong rules are hardcoded, dysfunction scales. -
Resilience requires adaptation
Systems must anticipate failure and learn from it. -
Strategy earns trust at the edges
Legitimacy is tested where rules meet lived reality.
